I really like this poem, and often find myself repeating it as I follow certain routines, like walking to the garden every morning as the sun rises. I think the poem is about the automatic existential crisis of being human, but especially the one of being so in a civilization that is, at its core, inhuman. Bearing such a “mild yoke” is a lot to ask, even before any discussion of talent and labor. While I don’t think this yoke is hung over our necks by some supernatural, all-powerful being—but instead is a simple function of having brains capable of realizing our material limits, i.e. that we’ll some day die—it is, nevertheless, a very present and, dare I say, universal burden. What does it mean to be human? Or, as a friend once wrote in a letter to me about not following our natural inclinations to be outside, seek sunlight, eat real food, and so on—in short, to put ourselves into cubicles: Why are we constantly at odds with ourselves?